379. Blindness in Elites: (2) Blindness of the Humanities Elite to Science

In my English-literature classes in the forties Science was the monster that killed Poetry.  Its weapon was Reduction, with which it cut down rich and many-colored Life.   Ripped off its fine clothes, hewed off its limbs, and cut out its tongue.  Shoved the naked stump aside and replaced it with a zombie, constructed out of the basest material by Logic and Mathematics, and able to make only a few baby sounds.

We at the time were unable to see real science, a plain and modest maiden, because the monster filled our field of vision.  This blindness let us assert our superiority, something easy to do with a monster if you depreciate the physical and elevate the moral and esthetic.

That blindness is different, but not basically different, from the blindness to science in postmodern English departments, blindness brought on, I believe, by the relativism and constructivism learned from French theorists, the elite of the humanities elite.

This is the blindness exploited in 1996 by the physicist Alan Sokal when he got an outrageously unscientific paper accepted by the leading journal in cultural studies, a new (say 1964) discipline nourished in American English departments.  The editors couldn't see that science in its easiest but epistemologically identical form, common sense, had been violated.  You didn't need a very uncommon sense, believed Sokal, to tell you that some things, like pi, can't be relative, a belief confirmed by the popularity of his hoax.

I'm told that French theorists are fully understandable only in the context of phenomenology, a philosophy dominant on the continent of Europe.  The category I fall into is "American pragmatist."  I'm drawn to the corresponding English philosophy by its helpfulness (cf. J. L. Austin, How to Do Things with Words) in the low field where I labor, English Composition.  That, it turns out, credentials me as a populist.  I see criticism or theory coming from the continent and I feel obliged, as populists do when they receive a delivery from their elite, to examine it for its helpfulness.  What I can understand I find unhelpful.  And I'm too busy to learn this philosophy I'm supposed to read French theory in the context of, so, life being short, I decide to just judge it by its fruits.  What do these continental phenomenologists do for me in the world I live in?  Nothing that I can see.  I'm abandoned by a blind elite.

Yet I understand their blindness because I myself was once blind in the same way.  In my first attempts to teach poetry I was a hotshot graduate student, eager to unpack the metaphors doubly and triply layered in Donne's sonnets.  My students were freshmen trying to figure out where the hell the verb was in these intricate combinations of strange new phrases.  Recent uses of the words "elitist" and "populist" fit, I see, the picture of my first classes: an elitist standing before a swarm of populists.

That elitist, blind as a bat, stayed blind for some time.  What had made him blind was — I know it sounds odd — his own quickness and experience.  Like other young English instructors he had been quick to learn English words and how they fit together to form sentences and was so experienced at doing this that the operations necessary to do it disappeared from sight.  Blind to this, his privilege, he was blind  to the work those of lesser privilege had to go through.  And his ailment was shared, I believe, by all his fellows. Their recruitment selected for it.

Now I, like a lot of those fellows, having learned that in the poststructuralist vocabulary we are "foundationalists," and having learned from relativist and constructivist philosophers to doubt that there is any absolute and permanent support for anybody, have been trying to locate our foundation, the epistemology that supports what's done in our classrooms.  Is there really no sure knowledge?  Does the status of every sentence depend on the interests of the speaker?

I found my answer not by reading more theory but by putting myself in the position of a beginning student, opening my eyes to his problem and going through the operations he had to go through to solve it.  That student, when he came upon Shakespeare's 16th-century language, for example, was pretty much moving into the unknown.  Not among those who were already familiar with the language, or among those who gave up until they got to class, he had to figure out what words meant and how they fit.

"He jests at scars that never felt a wound."  That doesn't make sense to him.  He takes "that" to refer to "scars."  How do you get a scar without being wounded?  And the sentence doesn't fit the situation.  Mercutio is speaking of Romeo, and he's had plenty of wounds.  "What makes sense?  What fits?" he asks.  He tries some alternatives.  Nothing fits unless he takes 'that' to mean 'who.'  Jigger the sentence to make it modern and he's got, "He who has never felt a wound jests at scars."  Fits Mercutio and what he's just said.  This forces the student to ask, 'Which is better, a good fit with a twisted word-meaning or a bad fit with a straight word-meaning?'  For help he goes to the probabilities.  "What are the chances that Shakespeare would counter all he has going with me, all that the contrast between Romeo and Mercutio does for my understanding of callow romantic types?  They have to be very low against the chances that he'd use a word that looks twisted to me, a 20th-century reader.  Go with the probabilities.  Take 'that' to mean 'who.'"

Without recourse to any repository of knowledge, like a historical dictionary, the student has gained knowledge, and has turned unknown into known — by looking at evidence, making probable inferences, checking for consistency with what's known, and for coherence within accepted theories, that is, by doing the things scientists do. 

Is the knowledge he gains useful in the way theirs is?  Clearly.  Say in the future he comes to the closing lines of Edna St.Vincent Millay's poem, "Oh, sleep forever in the Latmian cave."  These lines are addressed to the eternally sleeping mortal, Endymion, by the moon goddess Selene, who is passionately in love with him.  After nights of despair at her inability to make love to him she "wanders mad, being all unfit/ For mortal love, that might not die of it."  He's puzzled until, after a shorter time, he guesses that Millay has picked up the older meaning.  He repositions "that" in the old way and gets, "She, who can't die for love, is unfit for it; so, she is going mad."

After they get that straight the students' imaginations can take off.  One says, or at least thinks, "Wow, a goddess unfit for something human.  And what makes her unfit is she can't die!  Crazy."  Another goes further and pictures a woman at the edge of a Lovers Leap.  Someplace a goddess can't go!  "I never in my life thought of that as a privilege," she says.  Another student goes on to think of how the poet's view changes her view of her own coming death.  It's not anything to make you envy the gods.  It puts drama and urgency into your life,  something denied to the immortals.  "Rejoice," she concludes.  Another goes as far as "rejoice" and adds a "ha ha."  And the sixth student, probably a graduate student, runs through all that and adds, "Ah, carpe diem.  Winding up there again," while a creative-writing student goes crazy over the word "unfit."  "What a great choice!  So down-scale and so high-octane!"  If that thought is spoken we'll get a sympathetic Ph.D addressing the skeptical:  "Do you doubt there's a bomb in that word?  Look at the explosion among all these kids." 

These last might appear to us as hotshots, but they had to work their way up to it.  They're just not conscious of the work.  Nor, when their hot shooting takes them to high theory, takes them to Paris, are they likely to be conscious of its epistemological foundation.  They will be free to think of themselves as "anti-foundationalists."

I believe that the wonderful explosion of the imagination that epitomizes what poetry contributes to our lives is not possible without operations of the reason we associate with science.  I say "associate with" rather than "derive from" because we, hotshots and under, performed these operations long before scientists systematized them, and many of us now make them easily and unconsciously.  We call this "common sense" or "using our heads."  Whatever we call it it is epistemologically the same as what scientists do.

And it is incompatible with epistemological relativism, which removes its foundation, which is not anything absolute or permanent in a metaphysical way but is sure and persisting in a mundane way, the way that matters in our world.  This is the modest way of science, and English teachers who must in part pursue that way cannot believe what Sokal's French theorists believe about science.  If they do they have cut off their own legs.  With evidence and inference undermined they have nothing to stand on in class when they try to help students read a poem. 

This, I think, would explain rising low-level outrage at high-level theory.  "You are depriving us of our vocation!"  "You are blind to it."  "Go back into your cave."

We in English departments were in a cave because of our superior quickness and early intelligence.  This was our privilege, and when we conversed among ourselves it produced some very adventurous and evidently fruitful theorizing.  But it made us into one of the elites blind to what was going on outside.  And down below.

378. Complaints about Trump, Chances for Peace

There are two main complaints about President-Elect Donald Trump, (1) that he is an asshole, (2) that he is a Republican. We have to keep them separate. 

Republicans are people you can argue with and are obliged to argue with and have argued with for a long time.  Assholes are people you can't argue with, are not obliged to argue with, and have no history of arguing with.  They blow off arguments.  You can dismiss them.

The test for Democrats comes when Trump, in his assholy way, delivers some arguable Republicanism.  If they say, "Ha, just more assholiness," they look like argument-dismissing assholes themselves and join Trump on the stand.  They've forgotten that assholiness and Republicanism are separate things.

Some Democrats hate Republican principles so much that they're almost glad an asshole has come to speak for them.  They can really discredit these crazy ideas now.  If they are lazy as well as fanatical they see another advantage: they can do it without much effort.  Arguing and debating, living up to one's obligations in a democratic system, is so demanding.

In an election campaign, of course, you can forget about argument and call people assholes if it helps get your candidate elected.  But that doesn't apply now.  This politician is an elected asshole and you gain nothing by naming him asshole or by playing on any of the variations of that word , as smart columnists have been doing.  The really smart thing to do is hold back your name-call until you're sure that you are close enough to the election for the black mark you're putting on him not to fade.  (Holding back is smart in another way too.  It gives you a chance for inner peace, the opportunity to open your unreminded eyes for a few mornings and not say, "My God, the president of my country is an asshole!"  But that's personal, and minor here.)

I think the Wait sign we put on name-calls can be put on all satire performed or delivered before any executive orders have been given or legislation proposed.  If you jump the gun, if you bite the man before you've got an action, what do you get?  A lot of empty air, full of spooks, nothing you can chew on.  The same with demonstrations.  Million Marchers at the inauguration are biting on air.

Even when you're biting into something solid, though, you've got to be sure there's nourishment in it.  Biting off more of Donald Trump's personal ass gives the country no vitamins.  Get a good hunk of legislation, though, chew that up an spit it out and you at least secure the nation's arteries for the healthy  stuff.

If you go with the other complaint, that Trump is a horrible "Republican" or "extreme Republican," you still have to consider timing.   Now you don't know what kind of Republican he is.  Yes, you've had all kinds of scary indications, but you don't really know until you see what he does, or proposes.   

It's possible, yes Democratic elite, possible, that this asshole populist could propose something that would change the country for the better.  And if you still can't control the old liberal gag reflex, you could reject it.

Here's an example.  We've got this conflict with Russia-Soviet Union that was behind our decision to go into Viet Nam.  If you believe, as I do, that that was a very bad decision, and that behind that decision was the force that defeated Nazi Germany, and indeed is the force behind every victory in the old ways of fighting, male courage and cunning and determination, and behind all that, in the end, is the simple flow of testosterone, then, if you can consider on its merits a proposal by a patent asshole, you could seize a rare opportunity to redirect the testosterone and reshape what's been behind so many of our bad decisions, the conflict with Russia.

The difficulty of that is enough to make you think there's a law of inertia at work here.  We defeat the Nazi enemy.  We elevate those who accomplished that defeat to positions of prestige and power.  Pride in the victory and admiration for those elevated spreads to every male in the country.  The testosterone that flowed to such good, glorious ends, the old testosterone, is re-triggered any time an enemy, or possible enemy, comes in sight. 

That flow has got to be redirected.  What a job!  A liberal, peace-loving wimp couldn't do it.  An elitist couldn't even get us started.  Only a testosterone-loaded populist could do it.  One who's wimpiness is certified low (think of Nixon making peace with China).  Trump already has half the unthinking testosterone in the country flowing his way.  How often is that, that absolute necessity, behind a peace-maker?  It's the chance of a lifetime.

You've got to think way outside the box on this one, that box whose inertial momentum has carried all of us, conservatives and liberals (think of the Kennedy cabinet), along so irresistibly through wars hot and cold. 

It's a very painful trade off.  Can we quit fighting for the universal values we've stood for?  human rights? democracy? liberty for the oppressed?  succor for the slaughtered inside a sovereign state? 

We have to ask, "Is peace worth it?"  Is ending conflict with the only nation that can really hurt us (think missiles) worth it?

Once you're outside you can see you've got a lot to be thankful for in this asshole. Think of the things he's not.  He's not religious.  He doesn't think in terms of good and evil.  He sees the latter forming no axis or empire.  "Nation-building?  Screw it.  Democracy?  That can take care of itself.  The only question is, What's in it for us?" Apparently he's just a materialistic calculator.

Hateful, I know, but in light of our recent history, I think worth a try.  At least worth your considering.  While you're waiting to see what this asshole does.

377. A Post-Trump View of the Postmodern Elite

How different the views held by the elite look after the great populist victory in 2016, the election of Donald Trump.  I'm thinking particularly of views expressed in intellectual circles in 1998, year of the great quarrel between the dominating elite in the sciences, physicists, and the dominating elite in the humanities, postmodern theorists.  A couple of physicists had attacked French theorists, the elite of the humanities elite, in 1997 (Alan Sokal and Jean Bricmont, Impostures intellectuelles) and in 1998 both sides were battling — if you could call the few short reviews in journals of busy scientists battling.

The battling review I remember best is one in the London  Review (7-16-98) by John Sturrock, representing the humanities at, I would say, its postmodern peak.  "Intellectual charmers" was one of the physicists' terms for the French intellectuals (Lacan, Kristeva, Irigaray, Latour, Baudrillard, Virilio, Deleuze/Guattari) and I must say the term fit Sturrock, spokesman for the side I (by profession) was supposed to be on.  His prose was so imaginative and daring.  The humanities people were trying "to steal food from Sokal and Bricmont’s professional larder"; Sokal and Bricmont were a "two-man vigilante patrol" trying to "catch out a few LFFs" (people pursuing the Latest Foreign Fad) who were guilty of "acts of lese-science").  He diminishes the physicists' concerns so expertly, in the way of humanities people with words, that I couldn't help but be charmed. 

What Sokal and Bricmont were attacking is called factual relativism.  It's also called epistemic relativism and cognitive relativism, but whatever it's called the physicists couldn't tolerate it, either in sociology (the claim that the facts about the world are different for different individuals, or groups, or cultures) or philosophy of science (the view that scientific facts about the world are not absolute, but are relative to historical eras and to evolving scientific theories). 

And with many readers in the humanities who go to Wiktionary for that definition, as I did (Wikipedia is where you go for the common understanding), the scientists start out with a handicap.  Everybody on the Arts side of Arts and Sciences knows that nothing in the world, the rich, varied, mixed-up world, is absolute.  You can't make statements about it that are universally valid, you can't ask questions about it expecting certain answers, you can't assume that any issue arising in it has been finally decided.

And there are our scientists doing just that, with their belief that facts about the world are absolute.  That lets our relativists, with their more sensitive reading of the varied and changing world, slip their toes in the door.

It's a promising move, but it depends on their choice of the word "absolute," which is absolutely wrong.  As any practicing scientist can report, the box of absolutely decided things is empty; there are only more or less firmly decided things, weakly or strongly confirmed hypotheses — like (strong) that tomorrow the sun will come up.  Remove the misunderstanding and the postmodern foot gets stomped on.  It's not hard to evict belief that sunrises depend on who gets shined on. 

The differences with Sturrock and those he speaks for, though, are not so much over wrong belief but over how seriously such wrongness should be taken.  The physicists take it very seriously.  To them the relativism of the French intellectuals has "disastrous implications."  That, to Sturrock, is an unimaginative over-reaction.  Errors like this are not worth "a whole book."  The word "errors" itself goes too far; they are "intellectual misdemeanors."  Only "priggish" vigilantes will get worked up about them.

One of the misdemeanors Sokal and Bricmont get worked up about is feminist theorist Luce Irigaray's suggestion that science has a masculinist bias.  In Sturrock's paraphrase,

the 20th century’s most resonant (and sinister) equation, E = MC², may be sexist for having ‘privileged the speed of light’ or ‘what goes fastest’ over other velocities, and that if the science of fluid mechanics is under-developed, then that is because it is a quintessentially feminine topic.

To Sturrock Irigaray's ideas of the sciences here may be "dodgy" but "in that libertarian province of the intellectual world in which she functions, far better wild and contentious theses of this sort than the stultifying rigour so inappropriately demanded by Sokal and Bricmont."

Sturrock, like the physicists, is turned off by the extreme skepticism displayed by some of their French targets, the ones who reject "the very idea that facts exist or that one may refer to them."  He just wouldn't make his distaste into a big program.  He would (as the picture of him takes shape through the essay) stay cool, enjoy the "happily expansive discourse of thought" he's getting in these gypsy pages, and keep things in proportion.  I see him quietly savoring his difference from these fact-bound fanatics and inviting his readers to join him.

In 1998, with the nation enjoying peace and prosperity, a balanced budget, more and more states — on evidence that it was dangerous —banning smoking, President Clinton continuing his healing move to the center, the Supreme Court ruling in favor of gay rights, belief from the data that there was a high probability of significant water in Moon craters, and agreement in editorials that the Imperial Wizard of the Ku Klux Klan had indeed burnt a cross in his garden and deserved to be fined, you've got a contrast with 2016 that just begs to be made. 

Begin with the value of fact.  Test that value yourself.  With Trump's voice in your ears, telling you that thousands and thousands of people in New Jersey were cheering as the Trade Center went down, that the concept of global warming was created by and for the Chinese, that Hillary Clinton started the birther movement, that there was voter fraud in Virginia, New  Hampshire, and California, that the number of illegal immigrants was between 30 and 34 million [I'm going to keep on going until I'm sure you're gagging], that Barack Obama founded ISIS, that he wants to take in 250,000 people from Syria, that blacks kill 81% of homicide victims, that  the federal government is sending refugees to states whose governors are Republicans, that the unemployment rate may be as high as 42%, and that in the Philippines more than a century ago, Gen. John Pershing "took 50 bullets, and he dipped them in pigs’ blood," and shot 49 Muslim rebels.  To the 50th person, he said, ‘You go back to your people, and you tell them what happened.’ And for 25 years, there wasn’t a problem."

Are you disturbed?  Do these kinds of words from a presidential candidate make you fear for your country?  Well [I know this is shooting fish in a barrel], it's time to play your tape from 1998.   Oh these excitable scientists, seeing disastrous implications in a theory that tolerated error.  And trying so inappropriately to impose their stultifying rigor.  To simple misdemeanors!  Things only prigs get worked up over.

I listen to that tape and I can't help thinking of Casey Stengel, in the locker room before players who were to make 210 errors and lose more games than any team in modern history (the 1962 Mets}.  "Can't anybody here play this game?" he asks in anguish.  Then Sturrock's voice: "Relax, Casey.  Enjoy the errors."  And the players going out saying, "Oh, he's such a prig."

Final test: Go to today's social media.  Zoom in on Trump's supporters.  A fact appears.  How does it look to you?

I'll guess: like a jewel in the mud.  Look there, supporting evidence!  Water you've been gasping for in a desert of tweets.  Not just fact but somebody who actually cares about fact.  If you're like me you're saying oh diamonds, oh rubies, oh pearl of great price.

I don't think this is just a matter of elitist vs. populist.  A moderately educated populist knows that Irigaray is out of her fucking mind.  It's something deeper, and I'll have to think about it.  Another post.

376. Israeli Settlements: A Pure and Simple Wrong, Richly Covered

In a world of maddening moral complexity we should be happy when we run into a case as simple as the Israeli settlements on the West Bank territory.  

Making other people's land yours is wrong.  The West Bank is the Palestinian's land (check "Demographic History of Palestine," Wikipedia), what's left after the Israelis took the rest of it.  The Israelis are taking some of it.  That's an aggression, wrong, with a greater wrong and aggression in the offing, taking all of it, or all  within the boundaries of the ancient states of Israel and Judah.

You know you've got a simple problem when you can solve it by getting the answer to a simple question.  In this case it's a question we can imagine putting to the Israelis when they permitted the very first settlement: Do you want to take the Palestinian's land —  that is, all the land within the boundaries of the ancient nations of Israel and Judah?  As long as the settlements are permitted the answer has to be Yes.  Since every Israeli prime minister since Yitzhak Rabin has permitted new settlements the answer from the record is Yes, Yes, Yes, Yes, Yes, Yes, Yes, Yes, Yes, Yes, and Yes.

And the reason for the Yes's?  The prime ministers are politicians and have an instinct for majority opinion, buried or on the surface, and here the majority opinion is that God gave that land to them.  The majority, made up of a good many liberals, believes or goes along with what the sophisticated-looking woman in Tel Aviv said to the TV reporter after Secretary Kerry's speech to the UN:  "We will arrive and build and we will continue to be obedient to this tremendous promise that God has given us, the land of Israel" (Reuters video insert in Jonathan Martin, NYT, 12-28-16).

That's the Big Fact  and that's what Netanyahu had to keep hidden with his scolding and outrage and cries of betrayal and protests of innocence in his response to Kerry's speech at the UN.  Because with the Big Fact out in the open everybody would see the wrong of Israel's action, taking  people's land from them.  Naked aggression.  It meets every definition.

The settlers themselves were well ahead of him, and were maybe his model, when they put the label "facts on the ground" on their settlements.   Little facts, little facts, little facts, little facts (because they were easier to defend or ignore), then in the distance, boom, the Big Fact.  Removing it at that point would be so inhumane.

Anyway, the motive given is about as poor a motive as I can think of, to do wrong because God wants you to.  Your God, not the other side's God, not the God of most of the rest of the world.  The simplicity of it came back to me again and again as Netanyahu piled on his complications, his concentration on peripheral things, his tugs on the searchlight to get it away from Israel's goal.  I put him on a courtroom stand.  "Is it the case that you want to take that land?"  If he says No, up comes Exhibit A, settlements, what he has just called "not the issue."  I ask if there is any other goal that can explain them.  The jury is undistractable.  They know what the issue is.

The American public may at any time turn into a jury like that, and they have to be distracted.  The poorer a motive, the more wrong an action, the more flawed a reason, the more it needs to be covered with PR.  That's what PR people are there for, as longtime Public Relations sage Vic Gold learned from one of his bosses ("I don't need you when I'm right") and made the title of his book.  

 And oh how covering of the Israeli wrong has grown.  PR (persuasion) going on to lobbying and money (campaign contributions) and more devices of rhetoric than Aristotle, the great theorist of persuasion, ever thought of.  The wrong was covered and is still so thoroughly covered that 88 U. S. senators recently signed a letter opposing UN resolutions like the last one, against further settlements (NYT, above).  That's pretty close to the number of senators who receive campaign contributions through AIPAC, the main lobbyists for Israel.  (AIPAC itself does not make political contributions; it uses its resources to link members of Congress with pro-Israel donors.)

As I have said before (Post 225), the Jews going along with the settlers, making a majority, aren't the Jews I know.  Jews to me are sharp-minded CCNY graduates come to get an advanced degree out in the Heartland where they shot the bejesus out of appeals to the holy scriptures of primitive people.

And I have asked, more in anger than in pity, "What do I have to do with these new Jews?  Why in the hell should I support a Congressman who supports these primitives, primitives who want aid so they can continue their primitive project, one that drags my country into all this trouble?  And who have a prime minister who reproaches and scolds us when our support for his primitives falters?"

Now there is a question that arises, and shouldn't arise, and that Jews hate to see arising but whose rise is inevitable here, it fits so closely with what I have said about the Congressmen, that a torrent of PR has washed them to Israel's side.  What, to a candidate for election or re-election, is better, more persuasive PR than a big contribution to his or her campaign fund? 

That, fitting so closely the pogrom-igniting stereotype of the rich Jew pulling the strings of the government of the country he sojourns in, is a dangerous question to ask, and would not be asked here if the answer were not, "No, that is not true.  There is something better and more persuasive than money, and it probably sways more Americans to Israel's side than money."

I'm not sure what it is but I know I'm close to it when I place the wrong the Israelis are doing among wrongs I've read about in history.  The British putting Boers in concentration camps, the Romans raping the Sabine women, the Athenians killing the Melian men and making slaves of the women and children.   The latter is the worst (I've talked about it many times), and provokes the most fertile speculation.  How would I respond to the Athenian government hiring a lot of PR people, really slick sophists, to gloss it over? to Athenian extremists hiding Melian graves? to an Athenian statesman scolding me for having doubts about them?

As a young reader I'd been rooting for the Athenians and, the interesting thing, this wrong did not make me quit rooting.  Why?  Because I so admired what the Athenians had started building in their society, and seeing how what they started with played out, that I just couldn't switch sides.  Even though the side I was choosing was clearly wrong, and the side I was rejecting was clearly right.

Now I am not reading history, I am standing in the moment of its making, and, with possibilities open, choosing between envisioned products. "How will what the Israelis start with play out and how will what the Palestinians start with play out?  Which do I go for?"  The Israeli playout wins hands down over the Palestinian, or maybe I should say Muslim, playout.  As, when I stopped with my finger in the page of the history book, the Roman playout won over the Sabine and the Athenian won over the Melian.  Despite the crimes.

I am tolerating wrongs, unbearable to me at one point in my youth, but bearable now because I have learned from a larger number of history books that there are no starting points that don't rest on a wrong, and that no playout is free of wrong..  And, from my own reactions while reading, I have learned that if the playout is interesting enough I inevitably forget about the wrongs and get all wrapped up in the playout.  Sure it was wrong for the males in this Latin tribe to just grab these Sabine women for wives, but damn, they had something going for them the Sabines just didn't have, and I wanted to watch that play out.  As I did with other things they did to other tribes as they went along.

I now see myself applying the Test of the Playout to my own tribe.  We committed terrible wrongs against the Native Americans.  As I read of them does that switch my interest? my vision of the future?  How, I ask with my finger on the page, do I see the Cherokee cultural possession playing out? the Inuit?  Any of the wronged tribes?  Compared to what I see around me, the realized future of the day of the crimes, the Native-American playout is unexciting, to say the least.  

The excitement is in the promise of what a culture has going.  To the native Hawaiians trying to keep the Thirty Meter Telescope from being built on their sacred mountain (NYT, 10-3-16) I say, "Look, we've got something going here, and unless you can show me that what you've got going is more promising for the future, more exciting, more worth watching unfold in a book, I'm with those forcing you off."  To make the eviction easier, for them and my less convinced friends, I add,  "With all possible  accommodations to your feelings and traditions, of course."

There's no reason this shouldn't apply to the West Bank Muslims.  They're not innately inferior, they're not different humans.  They're just off on an unpromising track.  They're primitives and they have too far to go.  They once had some interest but now they're a bore.

Yes, the intensely religious Jews now determining Israel's policy are as boring and unpromising as the religious Muslims, but there's a difference.  Though they are fixed in their religion, they are not fixed in their government, which has, in the way of the West, provision for their removal.  The playout could go in favor of Jews like the ones I once knew.  There's your excitement and interest and hope.   And there's my support or Israel.  And if that's the support I, a fountain of objections to Israel's behavior, give, isn't it going to be the support given by Americans who make fewer objections and quieter complaints?